Mechanical voting machines are of course well known and in recent years electronic voting machines which more or less parallel the operations of the mechanical voting machines have become known, On the other hand, voting by means of individual paper ballots is also widely practised. Although the process involved with individual paper ballots necessitiates hand counting, there are certain advantages which are achieved by such systems, notably there is a permanent record of the voting and each voter is secure in the knowledge that his selections are positively and unambiguously recorded. This confidence on the part of the voter is important in no small measure. The conventional type of individual paper ballot may be replaced by a standardized card ballot in which the voter by means of a suitable pencil or stylus either marks appropriate areas or punches holes therein so that the ballot in each case may be read out individually by a card reading device of one form or another.
With a conventional paper ballot voting system an invalid vote selection made by the voter causes rejection of his entire ballot and he will never be aware of this unless of course it is intentionally done. Thus, although the voter has confidence that his vote selections are clearly recorded, there is no certainty that the selections will in fact be reflected in the official totals. Because of positive interlocks employed in mechanical voting machines which prevent invalid vote selections, they provide the voter with an additional measure of security that the vote selections have in fact been duly recorded to be included in the official totals. This "interaction" between machine and vote is an important advantage with voting machines. However, with respect to a conventional paper ballot system, mechanical machines are characterized by the fact that they record only the vote tallies and cannot reflect, as do paper ballots, the histories of the individual voters' selections. For example, one can inspect paper ballots to ascertain various voting trends, i.e., split ticket voting, etc., whereas when totals only are recorded there can be no such "audit trail."
Various forms of electrical or electronic voting machines have also been proposed and they, in general, have tended to simulate the format of mechanical voting machines.
In all of the systems heretofore proposed, however, the provision of write-in voting presents unusual difficulties. Moreover, in all systems heretofore proposed, voting is restricted to the ballot at the precinct level. That is to say, each voter must proceed to his own percinct in order to vote on the ballot to which he is entitled, it being customary that different ballots apply to different precincts.
Further, previous voting machines have not been proposed wherein the combination of reasonable cost is coupled with a truly systemic concept, i.e., with an eye to creating a system of machines which is at once truly adaptable to many and varied ballot formats while displaying the capability for rapid and east set-up of the entire system of machines regardless of the complexity of ballot format requirements. Nor have previous machines lent themselves to adaptations which provide flexibility with respect to the many and varied voting regulations which may be encountered in practice.